§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

§ Decline of Western Civilization: a Snapshot

§ Books to Read

§ BUY MY BOOK

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Accelerating Decline

In the theology of liberal-progressivism-socialism, human society is inevitably evolving toward a single world government ruled by an academic elite. This is the most likely explanation for Obama’s cringing approach to the rest of the world and his disparagement from time to time of our nation and its history. This idyllic world of the future is envisioned by liberal-progressives as one of peace and social justice (i.e., regulated equality of consumption).

This is merely today’s version of Karl Marx’s expectation that workers would rise up and destroy capitalist owners and managers in a bloody revolution. Presumably the fiery furnace of revolution would transform human nature, bring a society ruled by socialist workers, and allow government eventually to wither away. Thereafter, everyone would give his best efforts to society and expect only what he needed. Lions would lie down with the lambs.

The barbaric core of Marx’s vision, and that of Obama and his fellow liberal-progressives, is the necessity for intellectuals to make and impose the rules to create this fancied idyllic society.

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, accurately foretold what life was to be under socialism:

“The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land…All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!”

Lenin’s Bolshevik cohort demonstrated that while some intellectuals might actually have noble aspirations, so-called social democracy in practice emerged from the business end of a gun barrel. Lenin and Stalin liquidated tens of millions of Russian citizens deemed enemies of the revolution.

Obama, with his massive outpouring of executive orders and regulatory bureau edicts designed to thwart Congress and the judicial branch, is moving, albeit from a distance, along the same path.